ABSTRACT
This chapter reads a selection of photographs by Zanele Muholi and Siphumeze Khundayi as a type of cultural history of black women in South Africa. It traces how the images are implicated in transnational and historical figurations of the black female body. Several of the images (and the practices of reception in which they circulate) speak to the histories of shame and the deprivation of agency, and offer a cultural and textual repositioning of black women and desire in post-apartheid public discourse. The chapter explores the historical legacy of victimisation, and the interconnected impulses of both hypersexualisation by some, and the costs of desexualisation as a mode of resistance by others. The figure of the black woman is an inherently transnational construct that links colonialism, slavery, and apartheid to the present moment in unsettling ways. This chapter also focuses on how these discourses can be challenged and how more complex understandings of same-sex sexualities can come into view.
